Exactly where that baseline is will change what counts as cobjectification (and hence indirectly what counts as bobjectification) for a given person:
So if we’re going by social baseline, that means blacks weren’t cobjectified in the ante-bellum south since treating them as property was the baseline.
In the case of PUA, I suppose a reasonable baseline might be “other somewhat-personal face-to-face conversations between two people in a social setting”.
Except by that standard PUA isn’t objectifying. Robin Hanson analyzes all kinds of personal interactions in terms of status games and no one calls that objectification unless it involves gender (or race or some other protected category).
“We had a conversation the other day, and I bet it never once occurred to you during it that I might have 20kg of TNT in my backpack and set it off while we were talking. So you’re engaging in danger-neglect all the time, which shows what a silly notion it is.” And the answer is also exactly parallel: “Yes, that’s a possibility in principle, but experience shows that that’s a really unlikely danger, and there’s not much I can realistically do about it, and if you were likely to blow us both up with a large quantity of TNT then there’d probably be some indication of it in advance. Danger-neglect doesn’t mean not thinking consciously of every possible danger—no one could do that, so that would be a useless notion—it means paying less attention than normal to genuine threats posed by particular people.”
Except this analogy doesn’t work. Most people aren’t carrying around TNT, but most people would in fact like a million dollars.
No, it means typical antebellum Southerners, if they’d had the word “objectified” and used it roughly as I describe, might well not have considered that black people were being objectified.
(Although if you’re asking “is group X being objectified by group Y?” then surely the relevant baseline has to involve victims not in group X, or perpetrators not in group Y, or both. So an antebellum Southerner aware that they treated black people differently from white people, or that the dirty race-traitors up north treated black people differently from how they did, might instead say: Yeah, sure, we objectify them, but that’s because they’re not persons in the full sense, any more than little children or animals are.)
Robin Hanson
I’m not sure which of two arguments you’re making. (Maybe neither. My probabilities: 70% #2, 20% #1, 10% something else.) (1) “Robin Hanson does all this dispassionate analysis and no one claims he’s objectifying anyone. So dispassionate analysis is OK and what PUAs do is no different.” (2) “Robin Hanson’s analysis shows that most of us, most of the time, treat people as means rather than ends and ignore their preferences and hopes and fears and personalities and beliefs and so forth. So if PUAs do that too, they’re doing nothing different from anyone else.”
To #1, I say: scientific and economic analysis of people’s behaviour is a context in which we expect some aspects of their personhood to get neglected; when we study things we can’t attend to everything. And if Robin Hanson analyses behaviour like mine in a particular way, that neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg; there’s no actual personal interaction in which I could be harmed or annoyed or anything. This is all very different from the PUA situation.
To #2, I say: Robin Hanson certainly makes a lot of claims about how people think and feel and act that suggest we’re less “nice” than we like to think we are. I don’t think he’s given very good evidence for those claims, and taking a leaf from his book I only-half-jokingly suggest that cynical psychological analysis is not about psychology and that some people endorse his claims because being cynical about human motives makes them feel good.
But let’s suppose for the sake of argument that a lot of those claims are right. It is none the less clear that different people on different occasions attend more or less to any particular characteristic of others. (Someone attacks you in the street, beats you up and steals your wallet. Someone else sees you lying on the ground moaning in pain, takes you to the hospital to get you fixed up, and gives you some money so you don’t run out before the bank can issue you with new cards etc. It may be that, underneath, the second person is “really” trying to improve his self-image, impress any women who may be watching, or something, but isn’t it clear that there is a difference in how these two people are thinking about your needs and preferences?) If Robin Hanson is right then underlying “nice” attitudes (caring about other’s wants, etc.) there are “not-so-nice” mental processes. Fair enough, but that’s an analysis of the “nice” attitudes, not a demonstration that they’re completely nonexistent.
So suppose one man (actuated by evolutionarily-programmed behaviours whose underlying purpose is to impress women) sees a woman looking unhappy, thinks “oh, what a shame; I wonder whether I can help”, asks her about her problems, listens intently and when asked offers advice that, so far as he can work out, will make things better for her. And suppose another (actuated by a conscious intention of getting into her pants and taking advice from PUA gurus) thinks “oh, what an opportunity; maybe I can get her to have sex with me”, asks her about her problems, and offers comments designed to make her think he’s trying to help while keeping her upset and unbalanced in the hope that she’ll feel she needs him more. (I have no idea whether this specific thing is an actual PUA technique.) Perhaps you can explain the first guy’s thoughts and actions as cynically as the second, if you look at the right level of explanation. For that matter, in principle you can explain both of them in purely impersonal terms by looking at them as complicatedly interacting systems of molecules. But there is a level of explanation—and one that it seems obviously reasonable to care about—at which there is a big difference, and part of that difference is exactly one of “objectification”.
The difference in higher-level explanations matters despite the similarity in lower-level ones. For instance, if you know about that difference then you will (correctly) predict different future behaviour for the two men.
this analogy doesn’t work
The analogy isn’t between “VoR is carrying around 20kg of TNT” and “VoR would like $1M”. It’s between “there is a genuine threat to my safety because VoR is carrying around 20kg of TNT” and “there is a genuine opportunity for me to be helpful because VoR would like $1M”. If I am not extremely rich then the fact that you would like $1M is no more relevant to me than the fact that you would like to live for ever; I am not in a position to help you with either of those things. (If I am well off but not very rich and you desperately need $1M, then in exceptional circumstances that might become relevant to me. But that’s about as likely as it is that you are carrying around 20kg of TNT and intend to blow me up with it.)
No, it means typical antebellum Southerners, if they’d had the word “objectified” and used it roughly as I describe, might well not have considered that black people were being objectified.
So objectification is a 2-place word now. So why should I care about gjm!objectification?
(Although if you’re asking “is group X being objectified by group Y?” then surely the relevant baseline has to involve victims not in group X, or perpetrators not in group Y, or both.
I was asking about individual actions, not groups of people.
I’m not sure which of two arguments you’re making. (Maybe neither. My probabilities: 70% #2, 20% #1, 10% something else.) (1) “Robin Hanson does all this dispassionate analysis and no one claims he’s objectifying anyone. So dispassionate analysis is OK and what PUAs do is no different.” (2) “Robin Hanson’s analysis shows that most of us, most of the time, treat people as means rather than ends and ignore their preferences and hopes and fears and personalities and beliefs and so forth. So if PUAs do that too, they’re doing nothing different from anyone else.”
Yes, I meant (1).
To #1, I say: scientific and economic analysis of people’s behaviour is a context in which we expect some aspects of their personhood to get neglected; when we study things we can’t attend to everything.
The same applies to the book about dating behavior DVH was talking about.
And if Robin Hanson analyses behaviour like mine in a particular way, that neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg;
And PUA’s don’t pick anyone’s pocket or break anyone’s leg either.
there’s no actual personal interaction in which I could be harmed or annoyed or anything.
A closer analogy to PUA would be if someone reads Hanson’s (or someone else’s) analysis and started applying it in his day-to-day interactions.
This is all very different from the PUA situation.
Do you just automatically write that phrase now without regard to whether it’s actually true? It sure seems that way.
The analogy isn’t between “VoR is carrying around 20kg of TNT” and “VoR would like $1M”. It’s between “there is a genuine threat to my safety because VoR is carrying around 20kg of TNT” and “there is a genuine opportunity for me to be helpful because VoR would like $1M”.
Well, assuming your rich enough to afford $1M, there is a genuine opportunity for you to help me.
Always has been, and I thought I already said so fairly explicitly. (… Yup, I did.)
why should I care about gjm!objectification?
I don’t say that you should. The question I thought we were discussing was whether any useful meaning can be attached to “objectification”. I say it can; I have described how I would do it; the fact that the word has some subjectivity to it is (so far as I can see) no more damning than the fact that “clever” and “beautiful” and “extravagant” have subjectivity to them.
(So can a PUA accused of objectifying women just say: Not according to my notion of objectification? Yeah, in the same way as a sociopath accused of being callous and selfish can say something parallel. That doesn’t make it useless for other people with different notions of callousness and selfishness from his to describe his behaviour that way.)
I was asking about individual actions, not groups of people.
But the complaint that I thought formed the context for this whole discussion is that PUA, or some particular version of PUA, is objectifying. That’s a group-level claim.
And PUA’s don’t pick anyone’s pocket or break anyone’s leg either.
(First, just to be clear, I wasn’t only referring to literal pocket-picking and leg-breaking but alluding to this. I’m going to assume that was understood, but if not then we may be at cross purposes and I apologize.)
I think those who complain that PUA is objectifying would say that its practitioners are picking pockets and breaking legs: that they are manipulating women in ways the women would be very unhappy about if they knew, and (if successful) getting them to do things that they are likely to regret later.
if someone reads Hanson’s [...] analysis and started applying it in his day-to-day interactions.
If the way they applied it was to try to manipulate me using their understanding of my low-level cognitive processes into doing things that I would not want to do if I considered the matter at my leisure without their ongoing manipulations, and that I would likely regret later—then I would have a problem with that, and what-I’m-calling-objectification would be part of my analysis of the problem.
(The actual primary harm would be getting me to make bad decisions. Objectification is a vice rather than a sin, if I may repurpose some unfashionable terminology: it doesn’t, in itself and as such, harm anyone, but practising it tends to result in actions that do harm.)
Do you just automatically write that phrase now without regard to whether it’s actually true?
Er, no. I gave two specific things that appear to me to be relevant differences between PUA practise and Hansonian analysis (1: the former occurs in a personal-interaction context where attention to personhood is expected, the latter doesn’t; 2: the former is alleged to cause harm, the latter isn’t) and, having done so, said explicitly that those things seem to me to be differences.
I can understand if you disagree with me about whether they are differences or whether the differences are relevant. But your comment seems to indicate that you simply didn’t understand the structure of the paragraph in which those words appeared. Perhaps I haven’t been clear enough, in which case I apologize, but please consider the possibility that the problem here is that you are not reading charitably enough.
assuming you’re rich enough to afford $1M, there is a genuine opportunity for you to help me.
Depends where you draw the boundary line for “genuine opportunity”. I am, as it happens, rich enough that I probably could get $1M together to give to you. I am not, as it happens, rich enough that I could do it without major damage to my family’s lifestyle, my prospects for a comfortable retirement, our robustness against financial shocks (job loss, health crisis, big stock-market crash), etc. It is hard for me to imagine any situation a near-stranger could be in that would justify that for the benefits they’d get from an extra $1M.
So—and I think this is the relevant notion of “genuine opportunity”—it is far from being a likely enough opportunity to justify giving the matter any thought at all in the absence of a compelling reason to do so.
I should add that the choice of the rather large sum of $1M has made your case weaker than it needed to be. Make it $10 instead; I would guess that at least 95% of LW participants could send you that much without any pain to speak of, so the “no genuine opportunity” objection doesn’t apply in the same way. And it would still be to your benefit. So, is my not having found a way to send you $10 as soon as we began this discussion evidence of “objectification”—is it a thing much more likely if I don’t see you as fully a person, than if I do? Nope, because “I should give this person $10” is not a thought that occurs to me (or, I think, to most people) when interacting with someone who hasn’t shown or stated a specific need. So even though I can very easily afford $10, much the same reasons that make my not giving you $1M very weak evidence for objectification apply to my not giving you $10.
(If you were obviously very poor and had poor prospects of getting less poor on your own—e.g., if your other comments indicated a life of miserable poverty on account of some disability—then not sending you money might indicate objectification. For what it’s worth, I am not aware of any reason to think you are very poor, and my baseline assumption for a random LW participant is that they are probably younger than me and hence have had less time to accumulate money, but that on average they probably have prospects broadly similar to mine.)
So if we’re going by social baseline, that means blacks weren’t cobjectified in the ante-bellum south since treating them as property was the baseline.
Except by that standard PUA isn’t objectifying. Robin Hanson analyzes all kinds of personal interactions in terms of status games and no one calls that objectification unless it involves gender (or race or some other protected category).
Except this analogy doesn’t work. Most people aren’t carrying around TNT, but most people would in fact like a million dollars.
No, it means typical antebellum Southerners, if they’d had the word “objectified” and used it roughly as I describe, might well not have considered that black people were being objectified.
(Although if you’re asking “is group X being objectified by group Y?” then surely the relevant baseline has to involve victims not in group X, or perpetrators not in group Y, or both. So an antebellum Southerner aware that they treated black people differently from white people, or that the dirty race-traitors up north treated black people differently from how they did, might instead say: Yeah, sure, we objectify them, but that’s because they’re not persons in the full sense, any more than little children or animals are.)
I’m not sure which of two arguments you’re making. (Maybe neither. My probabilities: 70% #2, 20% #1, 10% something else.) (1) “Robin Hanson does all this dispassionate analysis and no one claims he’s objectifying anyone. So dispassionate analysis is OK and what PUAs do is no different.” (2) “Robin Hanson’s analysis shows that most of us, most of the time, treat people as means rather than ends and ignore their preferences and hopes and fears and personalities and beliefs and so forth. So if PUAs do that too, they’re doing nothing different from anyone else.”
To #1, I say: scientific and economic analysis of people’s behaviour is a context in which we expect some aspects of their personhood to get neglected; when we study things we can’t attend to everything. And if Robin Hanson analyses behaviour like mine in a particular way, that neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg; there’s no actual personal interaction in which I could be harmed or annoyed or anything. This is all very different from the PUA situation.
To #2, I say: Robin Hanson certainly makes a lot of claims about how people think and feel and act that suggest we’re less “nice” than we like to think we are. I don’t think he’s given very good evidence for those claims, and taking a leaf from his book I only-half-jokingly suggest that cynical psychological analysis is not about psychology and that some people endorse his claims because being cynical about human motives makes them feel good.
But let’s suppose for the sake of argument that a lot of those claims are right. It is none the less clear that different people on different occasions attend more or less to any particular characteristic of others. (Someone attacks you in the street, beats you up and steals your wallet. Someone else sees you lying on the ground moaning in pain, takes you to the hospital to get you fixed up, and gives you some money so you don’t run out before the bank can issue you with new cards etc. It may be that, underneath, the second person is “really” trying to improve his self-image, impress any women who may be watching, or something, but isn’t it clear that there is a difference in how these two people are thinking about your needs and preferences?) If Robin Hanson is right then underlying “nice” attitudes (caring about other’s wants, etc.) there are “not-so-nice” mental processes. Fair enough, but that’s an analysis of the “nice” attitudes, not a demonstration that they’re completely nonexistent.
So suppose one man (actuated by evolutionarily-programmed behaviours whose underlying purpose is to impress women) sees a woman looking unhappy, thinks “oh, what a shame; I wonder whether I can help”, asks her about her problems, listens intently and when asked offers advice that, so far as he can work out, will make things better for her. And suppose another (actuated by a conscious intention of getting into her pants and taking advice from PUA gurus) thinks “oh, what an opportunity; maybe I can get her to have sex with me”, asks her about her problems, and offers comments designed to make her think he’s trying to help while keeping her upset and unbalanced in the hope that she’ll feel she needs him more. (I have no idea whether this specific thing is an actual PUA technique.) Perhaps you can explain the first guy’s thoughts and actions as cynically as the second, if you look at the right level of explanation. For that matter, in principle you can explain both of them in purely impersonal terms by looking at them as complicatedly interacting systems of molecules. But there is a level of explanation—and one that it seems obviously reasonable to care about—at which there is a big difference, and part of that difference is exactly one of “objectification”.
The difference in higher-level explanations matters despite the similarity in lower-level ones. For instance, if you know about that difference then you will (correctly) predict different future behaviour for the two men.
The analogy isn’t between “VoR is carrying around 20kg of TNT” and “VoR would like $1M”. It’s between “there is a genuine threat to my safety because VoR is carrying around 20kg of TNT” and “there is a genuine opportunity for me to be helpful because VoR would like $1M”. If I am not extremely rich then the fact that you would like $1M is no more relevant to me than the fact that you would like to live for ever; I am not in a position to help you with either of those things. (If I am well off but not very rich and you desperately need $1M, then in exceptional circumstances that might become relevant to me. But that’s about as likely as it is that you are carrying around 20kg of TNT and intend to blow me up with it.)
So objectification is a 2-place word now. So why should I care about gjm!objectification?
I was asking about individual actions, not groups of people.
Yes, I meant (1).
The same applies to the book about dating behavior DVH was talking about.
And PUA’s don’t pick anyone’s pocket or break anyone’s leg either.
A closer analogy to PUA would be if someone reads Hanson’s (or someone else’s) analysis and started applying it in his day-to-day interactions.
Do you just automatically write that phrase now without regard to whether it’s actually true? It sure seems that way.
Well, assuming your rich enough to afford $1M, there is a genuine opportunity for you to help me.
Always has been, and I thought I already said so fairly explicitly. (… Yup, I did.)
I don’t say that you should. The question I thought we were discussing was whether any useful meaning can be attached to “objectification”. I say it can; I have described how I would do it; the fact that the word has some subjectivity to it is (so far as I can see) no more damning than the fact that “clever” and “beautiful” and “extravagant” have subjectivity to them.
(So can a PUA accused of objectifying women just say: Not according to my notion of objectification? Yeah, in the same way as a sociopath accused of being callous and selfish can say something parallel. That doesn’t make it useless for other people with different notions of callousness and selfishness from his to describe his behaviour that way.)
But the complaint that I thought formed the context for this whole discussion is that PUA, or some particular version of PUA, is objectifying. That’s a group-level claim.
(First, just to be clear, I wasn’t only referring to literal pocket-picking and leg-breaking but alluding to this. I’m going to assume that was understood, but if not then we may be at cross purposes and I apologize.)
I think those who complain that PUA is objectifying would say that its practitioners are picking pockets and breaking legs: that they are manipulating women in ways the women would be very unhappy about if they knew, and (if successful) getting them to do things that they are likely to regret later.
If the way they applied it was to try to manipulate me using their understanding of my low-level cognitive processes into doing things that I would not want to do if I considered the matter at my leisure without their ongoing manipulations, and that I would likely regret later—then I would have a problem with that, and what-I’m-calling-objectification would be part of my analysis of the problem.
(The actual primary harm would be getting me to make bad decisions. Objectification is a vice rather than a sin, if I may repurpose some unfashionable terminology: it doesn’t, in itself and as such, harm anyone, but practising it tends to result in actions that do harm.)
Er, no. I gave two specific things that appear to me to be relevant differences between PUA practise and Hansonian analysis (1: the former occurs in a personal-interaction context where attention to personhood is expected, the latter doesn’t; 2: the former is alleged to cause harm, the latter isn’t) and, having done so, said explicitly that those things seem to me to be differences.
I can understand if you disagree with me about whether they are differences or whether the differences are relevant. But your comment seems to indicate that you simply didn’t understand the structure of the paragraph in which those words appeared. Perhaps I haven’t been clear enough, in which case I apologize, but please consider the possibility that the problem here is that you are not reading charitably enough.
Depends where you draw the boundary line for “genuine opportunity”. I am, as it happens, rich enough that I probably could get $1M together to give to you. I am not, as it happens, rich enough that I could do it without major damage to my family’s lifestyle, my prospects for a comfortable retirement, our robustness against financial shocks (job loss, health crisis, big stock-market crash), etc. It is hard for me to imagine any situation a near-stranger could be in that would justify that for the benefits they’d get from an extra $1M.
So—and I think this is the relevant notion of “genuine opportunity”—it is far from being a likely enough opportunity to justify giving the matter any thought at all in the absence of a compelling reason to do so.
I should add that the choice of the rather large sum of $1M has made your case weaker than it needed to be. Make it $10 instead; I would guess that at least 95% of LW participants could send you that much without any pain to speak of, so the “no genuine opportunity” objection doesn’t apply in the same way. And it would still be to your benefit. So, is my not having found a way to send you $10 as soon as we began this discussion evidence of “objectification”—is it a thing much more likely if I don’t see you as fully a person, than if I do? Nope, because “I should give this person $10” is not a thought that occurs to me (or, I think, to most people) when interacting with someone who hasn’t shown or stated a specific need. So even though I can very easily afford $10, much the same reasons that make my not giving you $1M very weak evidence for objectification apply to my not giving you $10.
(If you were obviously very poor and had poor prospects of getting less poor on your own—e.g., if your other comments indicated a life of miserable poverty on account of some disability—then not sending you money might indicate objectification. For what it’s worth, I am not aware of any reason to think you are very poor, and my baseline assumption for a random LW participant is that they are probably younger than me and hence have had less time to accumulate money, but that on average they probably have prospects broadly similar to mine.)